A new study suggests the Big Four’s supposedly meritocratic promotion systems may rely far less on performance than on internal politics — and, crucially, on whether your manager is willing to put their own reputation on the line for you.
Within the Big Four professional services firms — Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, and EY— auditors are evaluated throughout the year after each client assignment.
Supervisors generally award A-to-D grades on technical competence, teamwork, leadership, and client relationships, creating a paper trail that appears — at least formally — to determine who gets promoted in the firms’ “up-or-out” system.
In theory, auditors who consistently exceed expectations should advance more quickly, while weaker performers may stay at the same level or even be asked to leave the firm.
Inside the promotion room, politics override performance
However, researchers from KEDGE Business School, ISG, and the University of Cambridge gained rare access to two promotion committees inside a Big Four audit firm’s Paris office, observing 6.5 hours of deliberations and conducting 61 interviews with 49 auditors and managers between 2015 and 2021.
What they found upends the idea that high performers naturally rise to the top.
According to the paper, promotion committees function far less as objective reviews of auditors’ work and far more as “political arenas” where managers lobby, trade favors, and defend their protégés.
Instead of simply aggregating the year’s performance evaluations, committees frequently reassess — and even overturn — those scores after heated debate.
In some cases, auditors with solid ratings were downgraded because supervisors admitted their earlier evaluations had been “complacent.”
In other cases, strong performers were promoted above higher-scoring peers because influential managers went to bat for them — or because rivals stayed silent.
Thomas Roulet, one of the study’s authors and a professor of organizational sociology and leadership at the University of Cambridge, said one of the deeper paradoxes is that “audit firms believe they are particularly fair, square, and transparent, while the collective nature of the work and the collective nature of the evaluation make it opaque and political by nature.”
EY, Deloitte, and PwC did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
KPMG pointed to its 2024 Transparency Report, which stated that the firm’s compensation and promotion policies are informed by market data and “are clear, simple, fair, and linked to the performance and talent review process.”
When managers themselves become the ones under evaluation
The study also found that auditors are not the only ones being evaluated.
Managers’ judgment is also under scrutiny, creating a powerful incentive to play it safe in performance reviews and align with what they believe the committee wants.
One senior manager told researchers he fought hard for an employee not just to keep her, but because he didn’t want colleagues saying he “overestimates his protégés.”
The result, the authors said, is a system where second-order evaluations — evaluations of evaluations — outweigh actual performance.
That dynamic “raises questions about whether promotion committees are fit for purpose,” they wrote, and helps explain why many auditors feel the process is opaque, political, and fundamentally unfair.
Roulet added that when managers lack influence — or choose not to expend political capital — high performers suffer.
“Those auditors who don’t get support,” he said, “get stuck at the same level or, in general, get less recognition than what they deserve. This fosters a strong sense of injustice and unfairness.”
While he said Big Four firms “do recognize merit and hard work,” he said, “the ranking system can disadvantage even high performers when everybody is a high performer.”
Fewer promotions
Internal politics has always been a feature of rising up the ranks within the Big Four, as it is in most corporate jobs.
The firms operate as limited liability partnerships (LLPs), a structure in which partners typically get a vote in strategic matters and a share of annual profits if they hold equity in the business. Making it to the top requires strong people skills, both in building an internal network and winning potential new clients.
You can be technically good, but unless you invest time building those internal networks, you won’t progress as quickly, James O’Dowd, founder of the global executive recruiter Patrick Morgan, which specializes in senior partner hiring and industry analysis, previously told Business Insider.
Promotions at all levels of the Big Four have also become tougher to secure as firms struggle to manage sluggish revenue growth and AI disruption to their traditional work.
In May, the UK branch of Deloitte told employees in an internal memo that it would only promote 25% of the workforce. The previous year, the firm promoted 28% of its employees. The same memo said that Deloitte had “faced a particularly challenging year and fell materially short of its performance goals.”
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